Rod Wave Elite is a popular high school basketball squad that bounces around the country playing exhibition games to crowds of rabid teens and internet celebrities. They’re run by a former college hooper turned influencer, Cam Wilder, and are named after the North Star of Southern pain rap, though the Floridian doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the team. If you pay any attention to college basketball recruiting or potential NBA prospects, then the team, a mix of five- and four-star athletes and camera-ready teenagers, probably pops up in your TikTok feed. The deal between the organization and the players seems to be that Rod Wave Elite will turn you into a character in its situational comedy internet circus—The Washington Post described them as “The Harlem Globetrotters for people who are very online”—and, in turn, you will get more followers and more brand deals. It’s basketball as a gateway to content creation.
One of the current stars of the team is Taylen “TK” Kinney, the 17th-best recruit in his class, according to ESPN, and a Kansas commit. He might be the most popular high school basketball player in the country because of a meme. In December, as part of a social media content dump, he was asked to rate a Starbucks drink. Cracking up, he responded, “6-7,” quoting a random bar from “Doot Doot,” a ghoulish Skrilla song that was then only a few weeks old.
The meaninglessness made Kinney’s use of the phrase reach a sort of ultra-virality that has been steadily growing all year. The fallout has been what you’d expect in 2025: Kinney (now called “Mr. 6 7” by Instagram pages) profiting off the attention with a brand of canned water called “6 7 Water,” the birth of a few sketchy microinfluencers (including a shaggy-haired white teen called the “6 7 Kid” who is currently using his fame to run a crypto scheme), and countless legacy media explainers of the meme aimed at parents worried about their kids who won’t stop shouting the phrase. The only thing that really surprises me about the hoopla is that it has turned Skrilla, a Philly drill weirdo who raps like a possessed clown and makes some of the darkest rap music out right now, into a minor celebrity and borderline cartoon character.
The idea behind Skrilla’s music is that Kensington, the area of Philadelphia he calls home, is such a neglected open-air market of drug dealers and addicts that it’s dystopian. “If it get any worser than that… that’s like hell,” he said in an interview. His 2024 mixtape Underworld imagines what that would be like by morphing the sinister choir-drill popularized by guys like Ot7Quanny and Hood Tali P into full-on theatrical horrorcore. Combining a heavy use of prayer, ghostly vocal samples, and his supernatural imagery of a neighborhood decimated by the opioid crisis—he calls it “Zombieland”—with a slippery flow that doesn’t quite sound like anyone else; it’s damn-near the Hell on Earth that Mobb Deep was going for. It’s political, even if I doubt he would describe it as such.
There’s a twisted sense of humor to the music, too. Sometimes it’s in the way he brushes up against a shaky religious ideology that feels like it was picked up from watching movies and YouTube. “Mama should’ve changed my last name to Santo/Once she seen what she done birthed was really real,” he raps on “Vampire,” weaving in religious references to Santería with some bullshit that makes him sound like Damien from The Omen. He also has a knack for using his cracking voice to make near-nonsense feel incredibly stylish and catchy, often tweaking his delivery with every word. I’m thinking of the screeching way he says, “Bitch, I’m geeked up,” on “Geeked Up,” or the sound effect hook of “Blahdahdahdahdah” or the flapping of his lips on his second verse of “Rich Sinners.” It’s easy to get a silly impression of the music off a five-second TikTok clip.
Sometimes, though, Skrilla leans into the most voyeuristic elements of drill. What comes to mind specifically are the music videos he started pumping out in the last year or so that feature him mobbed out and dancing with the local drug addicts. These videos have gone viral countless times and seem to have boosted his popularity through their provocativeness and gawking. He has tried to emphasize that he has a genuine relationship with the community, but it’s hard not to see the users as the butt of an edgelord joke, especially when Skrilla invites opportunistic, dork-ass streamers and YouTubers like Buba100x, Brandon Buckingham, and N3on to come through and interact with everybody like they’re zoo animals. Ever since he got more into exploitation, a lot of his music has felt corny and not as genuine. For example, Underworld reckoned with reality through the occult, while his newest tape, Zombie Love Kensington Paradise, felt more like a squeamish effort in turning the circumstances of Kensington into content for the Skrilla brand.
Obviously, I don’t expect high school basketball players turned TikTokers to be thinking all that hard about Skrilla, but everywhere I look it feels like nobody is actually engaging with the darkness of the music. A few weeks ago, on TikTok, I saw a clip of him getting trotted out on stage by C-list 2000s popstar Natasha Bedingfield to perform “Doot Doot.” She nodded along in the back, belting “6 7” like a drunk karaoke singer after he said the famous words, seemingly not even noticing the bars that come before it: “Shooter stay strapped, I don’t need mine/Bro put belt right to they behind/The way that switch brrt, I know he dyin’.”
Then, last week, I watched both the new South Park episode that’s shaped around the “6 7” meme, and Skrilla as the guest on a podcast from Matt McCusker and Shane Gillis, arguably the hottest comedian in the country. For about an hour, Skrilla sat next to the jokesters wearing a skeleton mask (my personal vote for best Philly drill mask is HappyDranker’s creepy-as-fuck dog mask) and chatted to the guys about random shit like his pet alligator and the time a guy in clown face paint broke into his hotel room. It was a fairly chill conversation, but it was clear they didn’t really care that much about his songs and just thought of him as the weird masked meme guy. Skrilla seemed fine with the deal. After all, it’s the attention that matters.
Maybe the emptiness I’m feeling is due to a dearth of rap-specific media that does more than point a camera at a rapper and go, Look how crazy this guy is. You know, the kind of stuff that could counterbalance the fact that the goal for most rap stars in 2025 is to develop a big enough brand to fly around the country shooting short-form content for other brands. That if you’re perceived as a big enough cartoon character not many people or companies really care what the music sounds like, or what it stands for, as long as it’s getting them views.
Earlier this year, I watched a video of Skrilla miked up at one of Taylen Kinney’s basketball games. After the final buzzer, Skrilla shouted “6 7” at some white boys and then met up with Kinney in the locker room. On camera, they had some awkward conversation where Skrilla was pretty curious about Kinney’s life while Kinney was more focused on getting a TikTok filmed as fast as possible. Once they nailed it, Skrilla shot around in the gym as Kinney was giddy at the footage, imagining to the camera how many views it was going to get and what other content they could use Skrilla for. It was almost as if Skrilla was a sentient mascot, not a human artist with music packed with complicated views and morals worth considering. Maybe that’s the dream?